NYT: Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

“But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho con­tend that sci­en­tists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the col­lider could pro­duce, among other hor­rors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out some­thing called a “strangelet” that would con­vert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of some­thing called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to pro­vide an envi­ron­mental impact state­ment as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has both­ered scholars and sci­en­tists in recent years — namely how to esti­mate the risk of new ground­breaking exper­i­ments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.”

I’m reminded of the (var­i­ously reported, often con­tra­dic­tory) sto­ries of Fermi and others at the Trinity site laying bets on whether the atom bomb would ignite an atmos­pheric chain reac­tion con­suming the state of New Mexico. I guess the stakes are higher this time.